TNW2020 was reimagined to the online format, and what a great event it turned out to be! X-Europe’s HealthTech and AgriTech startups were there and had the chance to hear from great speakers and network with a lot of relevant people. Our 27 HealthTech startups were showcased at the startups booths, and our company Printivo left the Health Pitch Battle victorious!
2020 has been an incredibly strange and challenging year so far that has seen the events industry turn on its head. The flagship Tech festival, TNW2020, normally held in the summer in Amsterdam, saw an opportunity in the circumstances to democratise event attendance through the online format, and invited people from more time zones, more backgrounds, and more industries than ever before. After a successful series of Couch Conference hosted in June and July, TNW has just closed its digital 2020 edition and the X-Europe programme was front and center.
There were over 200 guest speakers from various industries engaging in conversations and providing startups and corporations alike with insights into the tech world of today and tomorrow. The X-Europe Healthtech programme had plenty of relevant content to absorb too, with leading talks such as the ‘Accelerating the Future of Healthcare’ panel in which Aashima Gupta (Google Cloud), Adam Berry (PathCheck Foundation), Daniel Matiaudes (Rocket Insights), and Hans Notenboom (Philips) discussed how technology (and with that, also X-Europe’s HealthTech startups) is transforming the healthcare landscape. Also insightful were the talks ‘Investors Unleashed: the bets they’re making for 2021’, in which they provided the audience with the hottest investment trends of 2021, and ‘FoodTech: Investing in a Resilient System’, on how Tech can vastly improve an unstable, global food system. Also, there were fantastic sessions providing advice and guidance to startups. Our favorites include: ‘Scaling your Health/AI Business’, ‘How to compete with Tech Giants’, and ‘Leading Through Change: building self-learning organizations’. All of which were great talks for the budding entrepreneur looking to learn from the best. There were so many interesting talks and opportunities in the digital format that it was impossible to attend them all. Luckily, nothing can be missed completely as TNW will release the recordings on their website for select ticket holders in the coming weeks, so you don’t miss a thing.
The change to an online conference turned out to be very interesting. Within months, TNW had to figure out how to make the switch to an online platform and did that quite successfully. They found three interesting benefits to having an online conference. The first finding is that the audience was way more internationally based than previous editions. There was no such thing as a ‘distance barrier’ anymore. They only had to deal with time zones. But coffee is your dearest friend in these early hours. The second finding is that there was much more flexibility during the conference. Never was it so incredibly easy and fast to change stages and be everywhere within seconds, opposed to walking across the NDSM shipyard in Amsterdam to find a seat for that VIP session. Furthermore, the presence of an event or session wide chat function brought unprecedented audience engagement to the flagship tech conference format. It seemed as if the audience felt more at ease asking questions, logical considering that it’s easier to ask a question from the comforts of your couch than to speak up in a room full of people. Last, the networking feature of the conference was very entertaining. It allowed for randomized 3 minutes of virtual speed dating with any of the other brave souls who dared to enter the networking expo. So you could end up talking to cool attendees to serious matchmaking opportunities.
X-Europe at the TNW2020 Conference
X-Europe’s Healthtech startups had their part in the conference as well with 26 startup booths. In these areas solely dedicated to one startup, they could showcase their solution to the audience and engage with them. It was a pleasant way for some stakeholders to get in touch with them and to schedule follow-ups, and it ended up with a total of 22 corporate leads, and 33 investor leads for the X-Europe startups.
X-Europe’s startups booths at TNW2020
The Pitch Battles were also highly interesting. Health and Wellbeing has been a huge topic for the last decade, but the pandemic has catapulted the importance of this space. So, in the Health & Wellbeing pitch battle, different Healthtech startups took the stage to pitch their solutions, including two of X-Europe’s startups which have done a superb job: Criam, whose mission it is to provide fast, affordable, and in-situ blood test analysis to empower people with instant information about their well-being and health conditions, and Printivo, who has an incredible 3D Bioprinter which fights the thin Endometrium, a huge demographic problem amongst pregnant women. They were assessed by an all-round jury from different industries and backgrounds, including one of the X-Europe mentors Zoltan Vardy, and Kriszti Szabo from Egis, a corporate participant of X-Europe and currently engaged in matchmaking with several of the X-Europe startups. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the jury and startups for participating and also to congratulate Printivo for winning the Pitch Battle!
X-Europe’s startup Printivo won the Health Pitch Battle!
So, after all the hard work of setting up an online event, TNW has learned that an online conference is a lot of fun, has quite a few benefits, and provides good exposure and opportunities for the startups. Luckily, we still have some other X-Europe’s events scheduled for the near future, so no need to feel bored from your home office.
First off is Design Terminal’s Future of AgriTech Online Summit on the 16th and 17th of November. X-Europe’s Agritech startups will showcase their solutions there. So get your free tickets here now! Next year we will meet for TechChill’s event, which will be focused more on the third cohort: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning., Also next year, another edition of the TNW Flagship Tech conference will be planned to blow your minds. So stay tuned for more updates and stay safe!
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